Since there are some question that are repeatedly asked (over and over again), I thought I’d put up a small FAQ.
The game crashes, help!
Make sure that you are not running any other applications that interact with Direct3D, such as various overlays. Also, some people seem to be able to solve the issue by renaming or removing the movie files in the “movWW” folder.
The game only shows up in a small part in the upper left corner!
Turn off the in-game AA option. And read the readme.
Can you improve the performance of the game?
Beyond reducing the main/dof resolution (which likely isn’t the issue on most low-end systems anyway) there is not much I can do, sorry.
Will you release the source code?
Yes, as soon as it is at least remotely presentable and I no longer make large changes daily. I hope it will help people attempt similar things for other games and/or implement the 100s of features people are asking for in Dark Souls that I will never get to.
Today’s Progress (or lack thereof)
What I spent most of today on was trying to make it possible to accurately track texture and surface usage through the whole application. This would enable far more fine-grained and specific changes. My idea was to wrap IDirect3DTexture and IDirect3DSurface — which also requires wrapping IDirect3DBaseTexture9 and IDirect3DResource9. Currently (up to and including 0.8) only IDirect3DDevice9 is wrapped.
The problem is that when I finished wrapping all these objects I get a crash at startup. It seems that the GFWL overlay is doing something strange with a texture it generates, and I simply cannot find out exactly what is going on. I spent hours trying to debug the issue. Now I have two options: either I give up on the idea of wrapping textures/surfaces (throwing away a day of work and the cleanest way to accomplish future modifications) or keep working on it in the hope that I can somehow track down the issue.
Neither of those seem very enticing right now, but I still lean towards the latter. My first step is to sleep over it. If I really cannot resolve the issue in the next few days I may just release the source in its current state and hope that many eyes see more than two (and that people are forgiving of terrible code).
You are god amongst men
I have an Gamerlaptop from XMG – Core i7 with Amd Radeon 6990M – i works fine with all games – buy wait not this game – If i start Game, i can´t go in PC-Settings the game crashes – Start a new game – see the first two screens – then crashes. I find out: on my Laptop Monitor 1920*1080 63hz it wont work – if i connect an Monitor to the Laptop with 60 hz it works – but the grafik flickers very heavy – can see only every 30th picture … Can anyone help – i want play this game with my excellent Laptop Screen – not with an old 1280*1024 Monitor…
Hi. Thanks a lot for what you’re doing, it is great.
So if it is possible to make something with it, it will be appreciated… not even by me, but by the most part of PC community.
Could you please share your vision on camera behavior improvement? Is it possible to make it more smooth, because the only one way to play more less comfortable is with constant usage of target lock. But even with it, it is difficult to use bows, overcome long distances without enemies (on narrow bridges one can fall down accidentally because of camera slide) and so one. Camera sensitivity option doesn’t seem to work correctly. In my case with 1 for camera sensitivity and with 650 dpi on the mouse, camera still behaves like crazy
Thank you in advance for your attention and answer.
Just want to say thanks man, awesome work!
Now if you can just fix the atrocious pc controls haha
First of all, thank you for all this; the only reason i’m getting the games is because of your work.
A little request: would it be possible to hack into the starting gamepad detection routine?
Unfortunately the game really does not like if there are other gaming peripheral attached, so you basically have to unplug every joystik/wheel/whatever to get the correct pad working.
This is quite an hassle, albeit minor, but it gets worse for people who got some kind of gaming keyboard or other mapping software that creates virtual gaming devices…. if they get detected by DS before the pad, you are screwed.
Sadly, this is another very simple feature that should have been put into the game from the start by the developers, if only they thought that PCs are multi-controller enabled…
L.A. Noire is also guilty of this, but at least they provided a command line switch to fix the thing
This has most likely already been asked and answered but when I run this program with the game, the 3d part of the game runs in a small window in the top left of my screen while the rest of UI and menus are in the normal spots.
any ideas?
I tried to read through other comments before asking.
Did you try to read the readme before asking?
Sure did.. it’s not in there.
thanks for all the work u’ve done! :DD
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your great work.
I’d like to share some suggestions regarding improving the performance of the game, which have worked for me. I’m an ATI user with a slower PC.
First thing is playing the game in windowed mode and NOT fullscreen. I’m not completely sure why, but the issue where the game drops to 15 frames and gets “stuck” that way for a while does not occur in windowed mode.
Secondly, I have found that raising the process priority of DATA.exe to High has a significant effect in reducing stutters in the framerate. I think the game is very sensitive to delays, and starts dropping significant frames when anything “happens”. High process priority reduces these interruptions.
That’s all I have for now! I hope it’s helpful.
Cheers,
Bohdy.
petert,
Small suggestion about COM hooking. I do have problem when using a EasyHook in x360ce when app used Steam Overlay. This issue was caused by hook in a hook. ie. Steam Overlay hooks same function that x360ce was hooking. Maybe issue with IDirect3DBaseTexture9 etc. is same ? I used MologieDetours and all problems gone – MologieDetours can relocate overwritten original code. Microsoft Research Detours works too, but MologieDetours are MIT licensed. Also it allows you to easy access to original function ! You can take a look at my COM hook code here: http://code.google.com/p/x360ce/source/browse/trunk/x360ce/x360ce/InputHook/HookWMI_UNI.cpp (i needed to hook Get(), so I needed to hook all dynamic allocated functions in chain to get correct pointers). DirectX is a COM interface too, so same design should work, but it will require to use CINTERFACE like DirectInput ( http://code.google.com/p/x360ce/source/browse/trunk/x360ce/x360ce/InputHook/HookDI.cpp ) to make lpVtbl visible.
Sorry for my poor english….
PS: Thanks for this project, I’m looking froward to see the source code
I’m already using Microsoft Detours. Also, wrapping the textures does not require any additional detouring, since I just return wrapped objects from functions I already detoured. Still, thanks for the information!
i’m getting poor frame rates with the new patch; particularly in the lower undeadburg area (haven’t gotten to check out much else yet.)
Can I use dxfix to play dark souls in 640×480 resolution?
Yes you can. Just set those resolutions in the DSFix.
Afterwards, move or rename the movie files in your Movie folder to somewhere/something else, or else your game will crash when it gets to the “Dark Souls” main menu.
Thanks. I tried changing the resolution but it always crashes. I didnt know that I have to rename the movies to prevent it from crashing.
Does anyone know what the best settings are for my rig? Its a gaming laptop (hense optimus) but thats not the issue, I want full settings on everything and the correct screen resolution, right now my laptops maximum resolution is 1366 x 768. I put that in the DSfix for the internal resolution and I get a 4:3 screen with a huge black bar to the right. Should I just leave the internal reslution alone to be 19 something or is there a better setting for me?
Thanks
Euden
Anybody know how to set it from 32-bit to 16-bit in windowed mode?
thx for that man! and im get better perfomance with this! i dont know why. =P
can any one help me?
do i need to set up the dsfix file and how can i adjust the dsfix file ?
Many thanks for all your hard work, Durante. I really hope that we get the chance to scale the HUD in future, to make it look like this mockup: http://i.imgur.com/J3AVH.jpg
Dark Souls looks so lovely now and it’s a shame to see half the game masked by an obnoxiously large HUD.
Scaling the hud would be nice, i agree
i’m having an issue where screenshots aren’t working with borderless fullscreen mode. annoying but this gets the best FPS for me
Thanks for the great work !
Would be awesome if we could bind other keys to the DSfix functions like borderless toggle or mouse cursor toggle.. I’m using F8-F10 keys for Fraps and it’s bugging me..
Or at leat a setting for disabling the shortcuts.
I’ll put it on the list.
Man change fraps keys… its not that hard
Absolutely awesome work! You just made me decide to buy the game. From should be paying you for this! Anyway, I too would love to see an ability to turn on a slight turbo mode, like 45 FPS or 37.5 FPS…I read your comment that only 1/30 works right, but I really hope you find a way to implement something like this. I think it would be a great extra challenge to play in slightly “hyper” mode since most of Dark Souls is about getting the timing right. Anyway! Thanks again.
Hello, Im having ugly issues when running this on a Dual Monitor computer, it would be great if you could check that. Thank you.
Have you tried using borderless fullscreen windowed mode? It should put the game in fullscreen on whatever monitor the window is when you press F8.
I can confirm that playing in borderless windowed works fine with dualhead.
Donated
Hope it helps with beer funds / hosting costs.
You’ve done an amazing job here, and made it possible for me to enjoy this brilliant game on the PC, so thank you! I would encourage people to buy this man a beer (I went for about 5 euros, reasonably safe bet) if you can afford it, for doing what the original developers really should have done! Keep up the good work.
So to use the Fx/smaa injector, I just need to extract the d3d9.dll and other files to game exe dir like most games? Because I cant notice any difference using them.
I hope this doesn’t get swamped by the other comments but lately it has been found that Dark Souls automatically outputs the audio in 5.1 rather than stereo on the PC verison. Here’s a video which shows the difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku1ZBwB7Ghs
Although there is a way to fix this on some sound cards, you can’t on others, such as VIA cards. I know this isn’t to do with graphics but I was just wondering if you were able to figure out a way to force the game’s audio output to be set to stereo rather than 5.1 as the game sounds much better when the audio is corrected. Thanks and thanks again for the amazing work you’ve done so far.
Sorry, I haven’t got much experience with audio programming, and none with FMOD which the game seems to use.
Okay fair enough. Could you maybe mention it in your next blog post so someone who does know will notice it?
Read the description in this video. Might be useful for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku1ZBwB7Ghs
GFWL is obviously the BEST thing EVER.
Hello, i got a big problem, my originall X360 controller is not working with Dark Souls, i have no idea why
it works with any other games like Fifa, but DS just doesnt see it. Can sb help me? I heard about an emulator that fix it, does sb know something about it? I’ll appreciate it.
My 360 controller is working just fine. The emulator you are talking is called x360ce but he’s supposed to be used with non-360 controller but dont hurt to give a try.
It might be because of other USB devices connected to your computer. Try unplugging all USB-devices except your 360 controller.
Ignore me if you are using it wirelessly
Nothing helps, and yes i’m using it wirelessly. ;/ If someone knows what else could help me, please let me know.
so i just put it in game folder
how can i adjust dsfix.ini ?
right click, open with, select notepad
Got drop 15fps everytime i disable mousecursor ingame (F9)
Have optimus NTB and I am also using this mousefix(http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2904768) set to TAB key
Do you use fraps, check your options in fraps an see if you have f9 bind to something.
thx my bad
didnt even noticed that i was recording video 
you’re not the first to report this bug while running Fraps
So now i need new version of that mousefix or something similar included in DSfix to be able finally enjoy the game itself
> … mousefix or something similar included in DSfix to be able
> finally enjoy the game itself
HINT: Using gamepad would be a better choice IMHO. It’s not the “general case for RPGs” (while I prefeur to play some older PC RPGs like Gothic1/2/3 also using gamepad via Xpadder) but for DS playing with the gamepad is the way it was intended to be player. Game hadn’t been desined with mouse+keyboard in mind and porting also hadn’t been done having kb+mouse idea in mind. Thus it’s etremely painful to play DS using mouse+kb even if you manage to deal with all the problems while installing PPjoy and Co. And, once again, it’s not a personal rand against kb+mouse, it’s just how it is wrt DS. For example I hadn’t been able to get comfortable playing Witcher 2 with gamepad and prefeur to stick with good’ol WASD + mlook.
Maybe i am weird and game was designed for gamepad but for me gamepad just isnt comfortable (tried X360 one) at all. Apart from that lock-on problem , m&k is just superior for me even for Dark Souls
Only that stupid lock-on problem is ruining my game – best would be to find some variable which have stored if lock-on is enabled/disabled and use it for disabling mouse movement when lock-on is enabled automatically. Enemies could be changed by scrolling the mousewheel
I wish you all the brain juice you need for your work!
Just wanted to comment on the performance. I have a 4ghz q9550 and a gtx 260. certian areas are laggy even without the mod installed.
like the yellow wall in demo ruins. its laggy regardless of settings. My rig isn’t top of the line, but to have issues because of a huge particle square, even at forced 800×600, to me means there is something wrong with the game.
don’t know if its a driver issue or some parts of graphics are cpu hogs, or what, but something seems wrong.
> …but to have issues because of a huge particle square,
> even at forced 800×600 …
What do you mean by “forced to 800×600″? Do you set renderWidth/Height to 800 and 600 resp in dsfix.ini or you simply don’t use DSfix and select 800×600 as a target resolution using in-game menus? If the latter is the case – I suspect that what actually happen is the game still rendering into 1024×720 render target and then scaling it down to letterboxed 800×600. And, yes, “something is wrong” here and it’s not a CPU hogging – just run a Task Manager at background and Alt+Tab into as right after the FPS slow downs, you’d find out that no single CPU core hadn’t been utilized to its max. But if you took a look onto GPU usage you’d find out that it skyrockets into higher values (70-90) at the moment of FPS dropdowns. I believe that this is due to the way developers had implemented interaction of the particle systems vs. per-pixel shader effects.
This might help: I had the same problem with frame drops to 15 in certain areas and at particle heavy moments in the game.
When I had the same issue of fps lag in other games, specifically in GTA 4, I searched the net and found that Win 7 core parking can cause jerky software performance. I disabled it. The GTA run smoother and other games as well, also Dark Souls. It still gives me a constant 30 fps throughout.
Additionally, however, I installed Gamebooster 3 which disables and frees certain functions or processes of Windows for the time of gaming. I am under the impression that helped too.
I am a complete lay what programming is concerned and I do not comprehend all the relations of software, but the two tweaks helped. The game runs like a charm now.
gamebooster is useless software… someone still use that?
Peter, I suspect that DS + DSfix could mess up Windows regional settings in case the game crashes down at the moment of the intro-skipping of later on while trying to display the main menu. I’ve been experimenting with DSfix 0.8 yesterday trying to force the game to use 640×360 internal target render surface in order to check if rare the 15 FPS slowdowns would still occur even for THAT low resolution with 550 Ti card . It had turned out that the game is extremely unstable with render target less than 1280×720 in size (having it set to “stock” 1024×720 seems to produce broken title menu screen rendering with “Dark Souls” title string being rendered in corrupted way) most of the times making the game to SIGSEGV (i.e. “to stop working” in windows terminology) at the moment the game tries to display title menu screen. I use locale forcing into en-GB (as I don’t like the quality of the in-game translation to my native language) set in the dsfix.ini. Today morning I’ve stumbled upon a fact that the date/numbers format settings on my Windows user profile are set to be “English (UK)” instead of the previously used native language setting. I suspect that it’s due to DSfix messing up with this setting and failing to restore it back to what it was in case the game crashes. I hadn’t had a chance to test if that’s really the case due to the lack of time (IRL/work/e.t.c.) but I would try to reproduce this problem today or tomorrow evening. Would report back here my findings if any.
Yes, if the game segfaults it can’t restore the setting. However, the override is implemented such that it will still be restored at the end of the next gameplay session. So the problem should just be temporary.
Well, I had re-checked it (making game to sigfault by attaching to it via gdb and changing to NULL one of the pointers it was going to dereference) and could state that it was DSfix to mess with the locale settings – as you stated and as I had been suspecting initially – and it seems that DSfix fails to restore locate settings back after the end of the next gaming session. I.e. I had forced game to sigfault and then restarted it and made sire to quit gracefully. But the locale settings remained changed to en-GB and I had to manually reset them to what they had been set initially.
Right, that was wrong. Fixed in the current development version! The behaviour is now as I described above, and it also cleans up after itself (removing the PrevLocaleName value after successful restoration).
hey man .. thanks for all the hard work ure putting into this game n trying to fix everything … im just curious to know if ull ve able to fix the floor messages not showing bug .. its nothing big .. but im totally new to this game n some pointers would be nice for me … once again thanx alot .. ure the man
How does one person apply a backup file? I killed someone by mistake and i needed to buy something off of them.
Love the fix made the game playable, would be nice if you could also fix the aspect ratio for users with 16:10 resolution
Download Flawless Widescreen and you’re all set.
I use a 16:10 monitor myself, so I know that it works.
Great stuff you’re doing here!! I can’t believe the amount of effort you’ve put into this…
I know you got a lot of stuff on your list, but I just wanted to check with you if it is generally possible to fix the underutilisation of AMD/ATI cards (somewhere in the future)? The thing is that with constant drops to 15 fps the game is pretty much unplayable (or at least it’s no fun, which in my opinion is the minimal criteria a game should fulfill).
I’m pretty sure AMD won’t fix this, because as I understand it it’s not their fault, and I don’t think that From Software cares. So if you tell me that you can’t fix it either I could finally close this sad chapter and move on…
Thank heaps for all your work on teh game, seems your showing more support for it than teh actual Dev lol.
The only “game breaker” left in the game is the abysmal camera jumping while locked on an enemy. If there’s more than 1 enemy around you and you decide to target lock one of em, the camera goes ape shit if you move your mouse too much, and the lock jump back and forth form enemy to enemy effectively screwing up the gameplay and the tactical approach… I dunno why on earth they decided to leave that as is… This is the bane for KB+M users.
I saw a fix for that but it appears not to be working on XP and pain in the ass to figure out…
If you manage to fix that dude, you pretty much fixed the whole game.
Mouse hardware Advanced Settings:
Sample rate: 20 .. 200
Wheel Detection: Disabled..Look for Wheel..Assume present.
Input Buffer Length: 100..30
Fast Initialization: ON..OFF
Might be worth playing with these settings from DirectInput, setting them via INI.
Great work! I particularly love the resolution fix, mouse cursor toggle, and intro titles skip.
I enabled the save backups, and they were working fine until I renamed one of the backups to replace my main save to revert to the backup. This worked fine, but ever since I messed with the files, it is no longer backing anything up. I deleted everything from the folder except my actual save, and still nothing. It’s no longer generating backup files even though it’s enabled. Any recommendations to get the backups working again?
That’s strange. I’ll try it when I have time. Thanks for the report.
Another bug: “maxBackups” parameter doesn’t seem to work. I set it “maxBackups 5″, but I have 8 save backups in my save folder.
I’ll check that.
I have the same thing, I think I have about a hundred backups now haha
I can confirm this. Have always set it to 5 and had an enormous amount of backups in my save folder. Perhaps you don’t have permission to delete the files or something?
Fix dks framerate lock so I can play it with Intel HD 3000
Is this a joke?
May I add a suggestion, I noticed you said that with the current features you are trying to implement GFWL is trying to use, create, or modify a texture or something like that.
Have you tried to disable GFWL? I know for other games you have to disable GFWL to get certain modifications to work, for instance to get the ENB ICENhancer to work on GTAIV correctly you have to completely disable GFWL with a xliveless.dll or some file with that type of name. Have you tried this? Maybe that can help.
But regardless thank you for your hard work it is really appreciated. I can’t even think about playing this game in its previous nature. Really good stuff.
It may work, but the online is a key part of Dark Souls, so removing it is not a solution.
I try to use SMAA Injector with DSfix0.8 and the game crashes, any idea to solve this problem please?
I had this problem at first. It was caused by MSI Afterburner, even though I never use its OSD feature.
I went into Afterburner’s On-screen Display Server section and made an application profile for DATA.EXE. Then I clicked the wrench icon and checked the box for “enable compatibility with modified Direct3D runtime libaries.” That fixed it.
I followed you instruction accordingly, sadly it didn’t work. I also tried to close msi afterburner and it crashes either. I copy d3d9 and other file in Injectsmaa folder then rename d3d9 to the name similar to the name in Dsfix.ini. Did I do anything wrong?
Thanks.
Maybe you did the same mistake as I?
Did you by any chance misread the ini file of the fix and tried to put the smaa injector in this line?
dinput8dllWrapper none
->
dinput8dllWrapper d3d9.dll
?
That’s what made it crash for me. Just left it at “none” and then it worked.
I did replace the “none” line because if I simply copy the d3d9.dll to the data folder, although it would automatically work, optimus technology seems to use only intel hd graphic. Therefore I have to rename d3d9.dll to make optimus work properly.
Bad luck for you though – DSfix had been reimplemented as a DirectInput wrapper which hooks into D3D presentation creation upon load to overcome the problems with Optimus. SMAA hits just the same problem here. What theoretically could be done here is to implement a possibility in DSfix to use some other than default d3d9.dll when re-creating a D3D presentation but I’m not sure if Peter would like to spend his valuable time on doing this.
Who is really to blame here are nVIDIA failing to implement Optimus in a way they declare it to be implemented :-(.
Any plans to increase the resolution of the UI?
The plan is actually to scale it down.
wouldnt that require actually modifying a texture? if anything, turning the hud off in game and creating an overlay that would run in the game that was able to pull info from the game would seem easier
I guess it wouldn’t require messing up with textures. More likely it would require hooking into blit call and messing with call parameters on stack to make reak blit operation scale hud surfaces down.
Can this mod work also with other games like devil may cry 4 for pc?????
petert,
Thanks for the write-up and for your continued hard work on DSfix. I do have a minor question, however — isn’t the first point about Direct3D interaction with external overlays somewhat less relevant now that the fix is implemented via a Direct Input wrapper?
At any rate, I can’t wait to see your source code when it’s released.
It is, but I’d rather have people try anything that is plausible before reporting spurious errors.
PLEASE SIR! release a fix for the MOUSE operation in dark souls, you would be a HERO (you already are) for SO many people who are hating the mouse/keyboard playability, which is a shame.
If this helps http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2910072&fb_source=message
That link is the only known mouse fix and its a HEADACHE to implement, a simple EXE or file replacement would be better! Good luck!!!!!!
Oh, now this is interesting. Looks like I’m going to have to take a look into control modifications.
Thanks for the heads-up!
awesome man!
Oh, just so we’re clear — I’m not the developer of DSfix (petert is).
I was just happy to see that progress was being made on the controls front.
Sorry for any confusion.
no worries any/all help is totally appreciated!!!
I was hoping something like a DirectInput wrapper would be the key, but I’ve been playing with it a bit and am becoming somewhat discouraged. After hooking DirectInput8Create, etc., I intercepted the call to GetDeviceState and attempted to change the sensitivity, so to speak, by manipulating the x,y coords in the DIMOUSESTATE struct and then passing it along. While this “works”, it doesn’t solve the problem of the camera apparently having no fine granularity — you can easily alter the delta that triggers a camera event, but the smallest possible movement that the game registers still results in a large, disconcerting pitch/yaw.
petert, would you have any idea where I might go from here?
No simple ideas, sorry. My first approach would also have been to do some non-linear adjustment of the mouse movement, but if the finest possible granularity is already too much then that won’t work. Is this the case even with the lowest sensitivity value set in-game? Because you can always scale the movement up as much as you want for large motions.
One (hard) avenue would be to look at the stack trace for the calls to the DirectInput functions (starting from your interceptor) and figure out what the game does with the values. Then if you can find the position in memory where the actual direction is stored (probably as a set of floats) maybe you can it directly.
thanks for workin on this guys, if you can get a mouse fix that is easy to install, AND effective, you would be total rockstars for SO many people!
What some of us have been doing to fix the control issue is this whole shiskebab described on this thread: http://forums.steamgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2910072
Basically creating virtual joystick/controller then feeding mouse movements into it. For who knows what reason the “controller” allows much finer minimum movement increments than mouse does. Not only that, the Camera Speed option for the “controller” influences the minimal camera movement increment but doesnt for a mouse. What is most annoying about the mouse scheme is that it works totally counter intuitively. Small mouse movements jerk the camera around wildly in a small area but big movements wont pan the camera at a faster pace as one would expect. It’s totally ass backwards. Now what’s interesting is that with a controller the control scheme follows convention and logic as one would expect. Small movements small incremental panning, bigger input faster panning.
Anyways long story short by jumping through all those hoops posted in that thread you can get your mouse to behave as you’d expect, and like it works in every other game EVER made that uses mouse and kb control scheme.
Such an awesome game but seriously the whole port is just utterly moronic from technical implementation viewpoint.
Yeah, it’s pretty bizarre. Conceptually, I’m exploring the feasibility of intercepting DI::GetDeviceState, saving the x,y deltas, then explicitly calling XInputGetState and feeding it the saved x,y vals, etc.
However, I’ve never played with Xinput and it seems like the implementation of this would be decidedly nontrivial.
Before I waste too much time on this, are there any strong contraindications to success that I’m not considering?
for me would be enough something like this http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2904768 which just disables camera movement while lock-on and changes enemies by scrolling mousewheel. It has only one problem for me that for now it cant be set to Middle mouse button for freeze the camera
Just checked again and seems I was slightly mistaken in my rant.
Here are my empirical observations. Camera Speed setting does influence the minimal camera movement increment even with mouse control scheme, BUT compared to the controller scheme the minimal increment is about 5 times larger. Now here’s the kicker, the mouse scheme has no acceleration value! Any mouse input seems to be translated as IsThereAnyMovementOnMouseAxisXorY if true AddCameraSpeedValueInRadians to CameraDirectionXorY. It seems to me without the acceleration value the mouse control scheme is unsalvageable. If you decrease the mouse schemes minimal panning increment you’ll just end up with a camera that turns really really slow.
With the virtual controller scheme you actually have acceleration. Maximum panning speed is still capped to the Camera Speed setting.
In all likelyhood you’ll end up going the virtual gamepad option (ala ppjoy into glovepie).
This all is deduced empirically and I’d love to be proven wrong but so far it doesnt look very promising. Or maybe I’m looking at the problem from the wrong angle, there’s allways someone smarter out there…
Is this the case with the lowest in-game mouse sensitivity setting? If so – then I’d try to hit this problem from the “other end”, namely trying to use mouse motion events to simulate a virtual right stick gamepad for the game. It could be that the in-game gamepad sensitivity has finer granularity compared to how they scale mouse movement events. On the other hand it could be a problem that they apply dead zone for mouse movements (like it had been done in Rage) and then the only real solution would be to hack into the game process memory changing dead zone limits consts (or NOPing conditional OP which handles dead zone detection) which is a bad thing to do as techniques like this could trigger anti-virus software or built-in-game anti-cheating systems.
In case “virtual right stick” approach would seem like a possible way to go – you would have to non-lineary scale down larger mouse movements to compensate for the game non-lineary scaling up pitch/yaw changes wrt gamepad axis deviation from the center point. And compensation for the dead zone would also be necessary to implement.
Yea ive looked at these “fixes” and they do technically work IF you can get it to run, BUT the problem is people are having trouble installing it. theres no way to make a simple .exe or a file replacement in DS so the mouse runs as it should? Finding a simple way to make this all work would be ideal.
Surprisingly useful! Already beat the first Boss and the lame Londo ruins with it.
DSFix 0.75 works with the Steam-mouse fix as long as d3d9.dll is deleted from the game DIR (as per Petert’s instructions) and the given DINPUT8.DLL (DSFix’s) is used instead. DINPUT8.DLL (replacing the 10K dinput8.dll from Steam-mouse fix ) together with dinput8_.dll (mouse disabler part of Steam-mouse fix) works well together!
It would be best if Petert could find a way to:
1. Re-create all functions of “Steam-mouse fix” in DSFix by code.
2. In the future always test & make DSFix work well together with the Steam-mouse fix flawlessly. This way we will have FLAWLESS VICTORY!
Of course, a better/fluid mouse-camera control by Petert that doesn’t need GlowPie is welcome.
“Re-create all functions of “Steam-mouse fix” in DSFix by code.”
This would be ideal and sexy as hell
THANK YOU a lot for your effort!! Amazing work!
Excellent work. I’m very impressed with the speed you’ve been updating thus far! Keep the momentum going.
Re: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41671956&postcount=3700
“The game logic locking it to 30/15 FPS is independent of Vsync.
And when you override that logic you just get everything moving (and logically happening) at the wrong speed.”
If you were to override said logic and cap the framerate to 30fps externally via nvidia inspector or dxtory, would that at least get rid of the game falling back to a forced 15 FPS whenever there’s a slight drop?
No, then you’d be off in terms of time progression again. The game seems to only support the 1/30th of a second step of progression, and whole fractions of that.
Bummer. I’m an idiot and still don’t understand how the console versions allowed for variable framerates below 30 fps without breaking, but they changed it force the PC version down to 15 fps when there’s a drop?
The second video down on the page here demonstrates what I mean by variability: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-dark-souls-face-off?page=2 At least I can never see a 15 fps lock happening when performance drops, either a slight amount or significantly, on both the PS3 and 360 versions. Their other comparison videos show a wide range of framerates as well.
FWIW, I also don’t understand why they did it.
Hello,
First I would like to congratulate and thank you on your fine work. Second, I keep seeing this issue about the framerate popping up and I noticed an interesting bug that I was able to replicate in DSfix 0.7. After accessing the character status screen from inside the game, everything would speed up incredibly, to the point where it was almost game breaking. I was using this bug to shorten long walks, heh, and to outmaneuver large monsters. It even managed to take care of FPS drops during boss fights (something I’m sure is related to the particle/fog effects [Quelaag fight, for instance]. Long story short, something in 0.7 allowed you to break the FPS lock by accessing the status screen. The effect would be broken by resting at a bonfire, or entering a fog gate [basically anything in game that would take you into a slow-mo animation]. When I updated to .075 I could not perform the exploit anymore. I hope this helps!
It is a known bug when DSfix had been activating “intro sequence skip” at the wrong time – i.e. intro sequence detection logic had been working wrongly. Should be fixed in 0.7.5.
Speaking of game logic, I have no idea if it could work so bear with me there:
Wouldn’t it be possible to make the animation twice as slow and cap the game to 60 FPS?
(hence making them play at normal rate)
They already can scale to 30/15 so why not 60/30 with a multiplier…
Just want to give you a thanks for the effort. Awesome work.
Absolutely appreciate everything you have done so far. You have made this game playable for me. Anything extra you do from now on, is just icing on the cake. Thanks again and keep on being awesome!